Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

We've had a similar experience at Hack Club, the nonprofit I run that helps high schoolers get into coding and electronics.

We used to be on Heroku and the cost wasn't just the high monthly bill - it was asking "is this little utility app I just wrote really worth paying $15/month to host?" before working on it.

This year we moved to a self-hosted setup on Coolify and have about 300 services running on a single server for $300/month on Hetzner. For the most part, it's been great and let us ship a lot more code!

My biggest realization is that for an organization like us, we really only need 99% uptime on most of our services (not 99.99%). Most developer tools are around helping you reach 99.99% uptime. When you realize you only need 99%, the world opens up.

Disco looks really cool and I'm excited to check it out!

Cheers, let me know if you do / hop onto our Discord for any questions.

We know of two similar cases: a bootcamp/dev school in Puerto Rico that lets its students deploy all of their final projects to a single VPS, and a Raspberry Pi that we've set up at the Recurse Center [0] which is used to host (double checking now) ~75 web projects. On a single Pi!

[0] https://www.recurse.com/

300 services?? What do they all do?

And if you really needed 99.99%, you would be wise to avoid the hyperscalers: see AWS' recent multi-hour long outage.

Tons of little Slack bots and apps and stuff! It’s a vibrant community and people are always making cool little tools

Oh hey, you’re not getting booted after all!

(Just remember to take regular backups now, so that when this 5 year deal expires you don’t get into the same situation again :-)

Can I ask which hetzner instance you use?

Is it just easier than putting together a school server on the side?